If you’re a Fedora KDE user, you may have heard about the Plasma Login manager that is replacing SDDM in newer versions of Plasma. Fedora 44 has also defaulted to use this instead of SDDM. If you upgraded from Fedora 43, then you’ll still be on SDDM. 

sudo dnf remove sddm sddm-kcm

Differences

Plasma Login Manager is the true successor to SDDM as its intended to be designed for KDE Plasma 6. Visually, SDDM will look similar to Plasma Login Manager if the Breeze theme is used, however SDDM was used in the earlier days with Plasma 5 so it lacks some of the modern features such as:

  • Native HDR support
  • Better accessibility
  • Defaults to Wayland as the display protocol

To use the new login manager, follow these steps:

Installation

Open up a terminal (e.g. Konsole) and run the following commands:

sudo dnf install plasma-login-manager
sudo systemctl disable sddm && sudo systemctl enable plasmalogin

Once done, reboot your system.

You should now be using the new Plasma Login Manager instead of SDDM. If you’re happy witih the changes, you can remove SDDM as a part of clean up.

Kudos

Thanks to Barry A Scott for providing the steps on the Fedora Project forum.